POLAND. 



745 



troops that had fled to Prussian territory, 

 with military honors. Austria preserved an 

 entire neutrality, and protested against occa- 

 sional violation of the Austrian territory by 

 Kussian troops, in pursuit of the Poles. 



On February 8th, a convention was con- 

 cluded between the Governments of Prussia 

 and Russia, by which Prussia engaged to pre- 

 vent the insurgents from receiving reenforce- 

 ments and arms, or from taking refuge on the 

 Prussian territory, and, if called upon, to ac- 

 cord to Eussia all the facilities possible for 

 crushing the insurrection. Additional articles 

 regulated the mutual relations between the 

 Prussian and the Eussian armies in case of an 

 armed intervention. This convention was se- 

 verely and unanimously rebuked throughout 

 Europe, and led to a coalition of France, Eng- 

 land, and Austria. The Second Chamber of 

 the Prussian Parliament, on February 28th, 

 adopted by 246 to 57 votes, a motion of the 

 deputies Hoverbeck and Carlowitz, recom- 

 mending neutrality in the Polish question, and 

 asking that both Eussian soldiers and Polish 

 insurgents entering Prussian territory should 

 be disarmed. 



No attempt was made at provoking an insur- 

 rection in the Prussian and Austrian portions 

 of Poland; on the contrary, the Provisional 

 Government of "Warsaw expressly warned the 

 inhabitants of those provinces against any revo- 

 lutionary outbreak. This view was shared by 

 nearly all the Polish exiles, and Gen. Dembins- 

 ki, among others, declared him to be an enemy 

 of Poland, who would seek to cause an insur- 

 rectionary outbreak in Austrian Poland. Still 

 the warmest sympathy with the insurrection 

 was generally manifested in the Polish prov- 

 inces of Prussia and Austria. With the suc- 

 cess of the insurrection, notwithstanding the 

 strict guard of the frontiers, thousands of 

 volunteers rushed to the seat of war. In 

 the Kingdom of Poland, the movement be- 

 came in the beginning of March a national 

 one, in the fullest sense of the word. Even 

 those classes, which had opposed and even 

 strongly condemned the insurrectionary out- 

 break, regarded it to be their duty to show 

 their sympathy with the cause of Polish inde- 

 pendence, and to indorse the principal demands 

 of the National party. In Warsaw, most of 

 the members of the Council of State who 

 were independent of the Government, tendered 

 their resignation. The same was done by the 

 Municipality. Even the Archbishop of War- 

 saw, Felinski, whom the Eussian Government 

 had looked upon as their most unflinching par- 

 tisan, tendered his resignation as member of 

 the Council of State. Subsequently, he even 

 addressed a letter to the Emperor, advocating 

 the claims of the Polish nation, in consequence 

 of which he was exiled to the interior of Rus- 

 sia. In the eight provinces of Russia, which 

 had formerly been parts of the Polish Empire, 

 the national movement likewise showed itself. 

 In Lithuania, all the marshals of the corpora- 



tions, all the judges and judicial officers, and 

 all the independent public functionaries sent in 

 their resignations en masse, basing these resig- 

 nations upon a resolution not to receive any 

 communication from the Government in the 

 Russian language. The sympathy with the in- 

 surrection was not confined to the Polish in- 

 habitants of these provinces, who form only a 

 small minority of the total population (1,027,- 

 000 out of 9,849,000), but extended to the Lith- 

 uanians (1,645,000), who for centuries had been 

 united with the Poles, and to a part of the 

 Euthenians, who had formerly belonged to the 

 United Greek Church, and had been forced, in 

 1839, against their will, into a union with the 

 Russian State Church. Corps of insurgents 

 were formed in several of these provinces, es- 

 pecially in that of Grodno, though they never 

 became so numerous and efficient as in the 

 provinces of Poland Proper. 



Among the Russians, the insurrection did not 

 find as many friends as some of its leaders had 

 expected. Alexander Herzen, Bakunin, and 

 other chiefs of the revolutionary Russian party, 

 openly took sides with the Poles ; and through 

 their influence a few Russian officers were in- 

 duced to join the Polish insurgents; but the 

 majority of the Russians regarded the struggle 

 as a sacred cause of the Eussian nationality, 

 and not only supported but goaded on the Gov- 

 ernment. 



The hereditary fault of the Poles, internal 

 dissensions, showed itself among the command- 

 ers of the national forces immediately upon the 

 outbreak of the insurrection. On February 

 19th, Gen. Mieroslavski, well known to the 

 people, from the prominent part he had taken 

 in former revolutionary plots in Poland, and in 

 the European involution of 1848, informed the 

 insurgents that the Provisional National Gov- 

 ernment had appointed him commander - in- 

 chief of all the insurrectionary forces. He 

 began his operations on the frontier of the 

 governments of Plocz and Kalish, but was 

 signally unsuccessful. Soon after he had as- 

 sumed the commaridership-in-chief, his corps 

 was dispersed, and he himself disappeared 

 altogether from the seat of war. 



Marian Langiewicz was more successful, 

 and for some time was expected to become 

 the Garibaldi of Poland. He was born on 

 August 5th, 1827, at Krotoshin, in the grand 

 duchy of Posen. He studied, in 1848, math- 

 ematics at the university of Breslau, and for 

 some time the Slavic languages at the uni- 

 versity of Prague. Being without means of 

 subsistence, he for two years acted as a private 

 teacher in the family of a Polish nobleman, 

 after which he entered the Prussian army. In 

 1859 he was an officer of the artillery when, 

 believing the prospects for a Polish revolution 

 to be brightening, he resigned, and went to 

 Paris, where Mieroslavski appointed him teach- 

 er at his new military school. This place he 

 resigned, in order to join Garibaldi, upon his 

 famous expedition for the annexation of Naples 



